January 22, 1995

The Murder Case of a Lifetime Gets a Murder Prosecutor of Distinction

By DAVID MARGOLICK

arcia Clark was working her favorite kind of case -- a grisly multiple
homicide few were paying any attention to -- that June day when a police
detective preparing a search warrant asked for her help. The premises in
question were at 360 North Rockingham Avenue, home of O. J. Simpson.

Ms. Clark had seen Mr. Simpson in a Hertz commercial or two, as well as in
the "Naked Gun" movies, but had thought him unimportant, another fading
celebrity in a town chock full of them. When she went to his home, the press was
there, but it had frequently been present at crime scenes she visited. Quickly,
she assumed, the reporters would move on to the next murder.

They have not. Indeed, they will be out in force on Monday when Ms. Clark,
until June 13, 1994, an obscure deputy district attorney, begins trying to
convince 12 jurors and the rest of the world that Mr. Simpson murdered his
former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald L. Goldman, a friend who picked a
poor time to do her a favor. Watching the 41-year-old Ms. Clark on television
will be millions of people who have come to feel that they know her. In fact,
they know but a part.

They know her looks: petite with ringlets of dark hair and the
much-talked-about short skirts that even Judge Lance A. Ito has commented on. If
one of Mr. Simpson's lawyers, Robert L. Shapiro, has the bar's best-known bald
spot, Ms. Clark has its most memorable mole, above her lip.

They also know her intensity, the way she comes across as a straight arrow,
and that slightly smoky and largely inflectionless voice.

What they have not seen is the side her friends and colleagues know well.
That side has a wicked sense of humor, laughs raucously, loves to dance and has
a life-size framed poster of Jim Morrison on her office wall and one of Jimi
Hendrix at home. Drink for drink and cuss for cuss, that side can match the
toughest detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department, so much so that her
superiors once urged her to curb the profanities, at least when walking through
the waiting room of the District Attorney's office.

It is the side that sneaks cigarettes in some secret corner of the ostensibly
smoke-free criminal courts building but will not say where. "I have my Fifth
Amendment rights," she told a colleague.

It is also the side that, in the midst of this hubbub, has her rearing two
young boys largely by herself after her second marriage ended in divorce last
year.

Ms. Clark has been a prosecutor for 13 years, a job she took after a short,
unhappy stint as a defense lawyer. She simply could not abide, she has said,
helping the obviously guilty go free. Now, since switching sides, she has almost
always won convictions.

Clearly her record is partly a tribute to the kinds of cases prosecutors
bring, the people they bring them against and the limited talent or resources of
the lawyers representing those people. "Slam dunks," defense lawyers call such
cases.

This time she faces a defendant still beloved by some and represented not by
an overworked and underfinanced public defender but by one of the most
formidable -- if not necessarily the most cohesive -- defense teams ever
assembled.

Still, those who have encountered her say she is not overmatched.

"She's one of those total prosecutors who see every aspect of the case," said
Barry Levin, a criminal defense lawyer who once did battle with her for more
than a year. "I want a D.A. who's sloppy, unorganized, lazy, inarticulate, does
not show right emotions at the right time, is unprepared and hasn't got a plan.
Marcia is none of those things. She has no appreciable weaknesses."

Ms. Clark seems to thrive on the macabre, gruesome world of murder and
mayhem, in which she has willingly, enthusiastically immersed herself for the
last 10 years. The Simpson case, one of her colleagues said, is "like cocaine"
to her. Even her pleasure reading tends toward the gory and the noir; one
favorite is Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles." But her last two books were
also Mrs. Simpson's: Susan Forward's "Obsessive Love" and "Men Who Hate Women &
the Women Who Love Them."

One Tough Woman, And Sensitivity to Match

From the outset, Ms. Clark's appearance and demeanor have been intensely
analyzed and criticized. The case's ubiquitous commentators complained that she
was unnecessarily dour and dressed drably. Dark and grim, at times she resembled
the lead character in the film "The Piano."

"Looks tough. I wouldn't mess with her," one juror wrote on a questionnaire.
And press reports said members of one prosecution focus group had described her
the way Newt Gingrich described Hillary Rodham Clinton to his mother.

But Ms. Clark is no stranger to "downtown" juries -- the local euphemism for
panels stocked with minorities -- and those who have squared off against her
predict that the Simpson jury will both like her and understand her. "She's
straight and down to earth and doesn't talk over anyone's head," said Richard
Leonard, who represented one of several people Ms. Clark has sent to death
row.

Friends insist that apart from buying a different kind of makeup pencil,
which her youngest son promptly stuffed down a drainpipe in her backyard,
Marcia Clark has undergone no makeover. Any changes, they say, reflect only a
routine evolution of hair styles and wardrobes (either bought at discount houses
or borrowed from friends), plus some reversion to her normal self as she has
adapted to all the attention.

Ms. Clark goes for the gruesome, she has explained, because she believes that
the more horrific the crime, the needier the crime victims. And perhaps the more
appreciative.

Members of Ronald Goldman's family report that whenever Ms. Clark sees them,
she hugs them. When she cannot see them, she checks in periodically, and is
always available by beeper. During court hearings, she glances over
periodically, and signals whenever anything disturbing, like autopsy reports or
photographs of the crime scene, is about to be presented. They say she has both
bucked them up without supplying any false hope and questioned them without
inflicting any unnecessary pain.

"She seems always to be concerned with our family, how we're doing, and at
the same time there's never a doubt in my mind she's working 25 hours a day, 10
days a week, on this case," Mr. Goldman's father, Frederic, said in an
interview. "On a scale of 1 to 100, she easily gets 110."

Denise Brown, one of Nicole Simpson's sisters, agrees. "I think Marcia is
wonderful, a terrific woman, and I think my whole family will vouch for that
one," she recently told The New Yorker magazine.

Despite a routine in which a 12-hour day is short, 14 hours is common and 18
hours is not extraordinary, Ms. Clark maintains some semblance of a family life.
She returns nightly to her home, whose interior is still perilously waterlogged
from the recent rains, to tuck in her two children, even if that means driving
back to the office afterward. Her love life is on hold, although plenty of men
now write her.

What has not fallen victim to her schedule has been tugged by her celebrity.
When she finally does leave her office, she spots her face at checkout counters
or sees herself on television. (Her elder son, 5-year-old Travis, has taken to
kissing the television screen whenever she is on it.) To avoid gawkers, she
shops at odd hours and brings along friends to run interference.

Fearful of seeming hoity-toity, though, she still accommodates autograph
seekers, however flabbergasting she finds their interest. For a man about to
enlist in the Army, she signed a recent issue of Mad magazine whose cover bore
her caricature. "Don't forget to duck," she wrote.

Neither Ms. Clark nor any other lawyer ever before had a case like People v.
Simpson. But some of her cases have been noteworthy in their own right, and some
she made that way.

In 1991, she won a murder conviction against Robert John Bardo, who had
killed the actress Rebecca Shaeffer. The conviction was due in part to her
spotting what she called "a physical version of a Freudian slip" in Mr.
Bardo's re-enactment of the ostensibly impulsive way in which he had shot his
victim.

Two years later, she obtained a conviction of two men in the killing of a
pair of parishioners in a Los Angeles church, then won death sentences after
playing for the jury a videotape of one of the victims singing "Summertime" in
the church choir.

Ms. Clark's detractors -- or public detractors -- are few. Two are Joe Ingber
and Albert Garber, veteran defense lawyers in Los Angeles who tried a case
against her several years ago. Mr. Ingber said Ms. Clark had withheld material
unnecessarily, had whined to judges and had "genderized" excessively -- that is,
tried endlessly to use her femininity to her advantage. Mr. Garber said she
sometimes lost her temper. "You don't do that with a Johnnie Cochran," he said
of Mr. Simpson's lead lawyer, who is skilled enough to turn such behavior to his
own benefit.

But around her office, Ms. Clark is known for an encyclopedic knowledge of
case law, her availability to younger lawyers and her aptitude for new
disciplines, like ballistics or the science of DNA. She is also known for eating
salads at her desk for lunch, munching pretzels in the afternoon and schmoozing
with the police detectives who stop by her office to grab some coffee or shoot
the breeze.

Where Was Home? Just About Everywhere

The itinerary of Ms. Clark's childhood resembles that of a third-string rock
band. Her father, an Israeli-born chemist, rose quickly through the ranks of the
Food and Drug Administration, and the family moved often. By the time little
Marcia Kleks was 14, she had lived in Berkeley, Calif., her birthplace; on an
Army base in Texas; in Tacoma, Wash.; in Santa Monica, Covina and Foster City,
Calif.; in Detroit; in Kensington Park, Md., and on Staten Island.

She spent two contented years in New York, studying, acting and dancing at
Susan Wagner High School and working after hours in Greenwich Village boutiques.
Then her family moved back to California.

Ms. Clark has described her religious training as "Jewish Lite" -- that is,
celebrations of Hanukkah and Passover but little else. She learned Hebrew from
her father, however, and her first husband, Gaby Horowitz, a professional
backgammon player whom she met when she was 18, was Israeli.

She graduated in three years from U.C.L.A. After that, she toured briefly
with a professional folk ballet group, then enrolled at Southwestern University
Law School in Los Angeles. Her husband opposed the enrollment, because, she has
said, he wanted her at home. She moved out on him, borrowing money for tuition
and waiting on tables. With those lean times ever in mind, she remains a good
tipper to this day.

Shortly after taking her bar examination in 1980, she divorced Mr. Horowitz,
then quickly married Gordon Clark, an official with the Church of Scientology
five years her junior. He is the father of her two sons; the Clarks separated in
January 1994, and on June 9, four days before she was assigned the Simpson case,
she filed for divorce.

Her desire to represent criminal defendants having survived law school, Ms.
Clark went into private practice with a criminal defense firm. But she chafed at
drafting a motion to dismiss a case against a man she knew was guilty, and
blanched when that motion was granted. In 1981, she joined the District
Attorney's office. A few years later, she fell under the tutelage of Harvey
Giss, one of the office's legendary murder prosecutors. Introducing her to such
work, Mr. Giss recalled, was "like putting airplane fuel in a Chevrolet."

"What she really was, was a terrific trial lawyer waiting to emerge," he
said.

Eager to avoid prostitution and drug cases, which she considered relatively
unimportant, in 1989 she joined the special trials unit, which handles the most
complex murder cases. There, but for a brief fling with administration, she has
remained ever since.

One of the lawyers she has since faced, Madelynn Kopple of Santa Monica,
recalls Ms. Clark's work in a double murder case. It was the kind of case -- a
drug deal gone bad -- in which jurors usually pay victims little mind. But by
re-creating the last 20 minutes of these victims' lives, spent tied up in the
back of a truck en route to their execution, Ms. Clark made the jury care enough
to impose death sentences on those who had done the deed. And she did so when
she was eight months pregnant.

"She gave the most powerful argument I ever heard to a jury," Ms. Kopple
said. "I was shuddering when I heard it. When this trial gets going, there's
nobody tougher than her. Nobody."